Let's be Clear on Native Veg Clearing Rates

Let's be clear on native veg clearing rates

New tree clearing laws will soon come into effect in NSW. They will change the way applications to clear native vegetation are assessed. Under the new rules, locally-based experts on regional Catchment Management Authorities, rather than bureaucrats, will deliberate over applications. The NSW Farmers' Federation has welcomed the changes on the basis the new regime will provide more flexibility and decisions to reject applications will need to be based on "clear scientific reason".

Local decision making was promoted in Queensland a few years ago. The regionally developed plans, however, were never going to be implemented once it became evident that this would result in what the environment movement deemed to be too high a clearing rate. New Queensland legislation, purportedly to outlaw broad-scale tree clearing by December 2006, is due to be introduced into the Queensland Parliament this week.

The tree clearing rate in Queensland averaged 437,000 hectares per year over the period 1991-2001. This includes approximately 757,000 hectares "panic cleared" in 1999-2000 immediately before the introduction of the Vegetation Management Act 2000. However, according to the Queensland Government report Land Cover Change in Queensland 1999-2001, even then, during the height of clearing, the annual clearing rate was only 0.71 per cent of the 81 million hectares of woodland, forest and shrub cover across Queensland.

According to page 14 of the same report, there has been a 5 million hectares increase in the area classified as woody vegetation in Queensland over the period 1992 to 2001.

John Benson's much quoted Setting the Scene: The Native Vegetation of New South Wales report of the Native Vegetation Advisory Council of NSW (1999) emphasizes loss of biodiversity associated with broad-scale tree clearing and shows the total area that has been cleared of native vegetation for each bioregion in NSW (Benson is from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney). The report, however, does not indicate the net change in native vegetation cover. It indicates 35 million hectares of land was cleared before 1921 (page 27) and a number of anecdotes are added to allow the reader to assume that subsequent clearing has made the problem worse.

Curiously, the report does not have a total figure for the State. A simple tally reveals that a lesser value of 28 million ha is recorded being cleared by 1998. Subtracting the 1998 value (28m ha) from the 1921 value (35m ha) would suggest that, despite all clearing in NSW since 1921, there has still been a net increase in native vegetation of approximately 7 million ha. In other words, the general trend is one of increasing native vegetation cover.

The new laws in Queensland and NSW have been developed in a political environmental that has assumed a trend of increasing native vegetation loss -- in particular that there has been a reduction in the extent of forest cover. The official statistics, however, suggest a trend of increasing forest cover for both States.

Re-growth and woodland thickening in the rangelands of both NSW and Queensland is well documented in the scientific literature. The phenomenon, however, has been largely ignored by the political process driven by green campaigning that has given the very false impression that broad-scale tree clearing is the key issue -- reducing overall forest cover and destroying the environment.

Despite some good intentions, I can't see any of the vegetation management issues being resolved in the short to medium term. At what point can we conclude that there has been sufficient conservation if we do not know, or can not agree, what the long-term trends are with respect to re-growth and woodland thickening?

We need better information, including relevant statistics and honest discussion. It may also need to be acknowledged that our grasslands are as valuable and as vulnerable as our forests.

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